Sip your beer you piece of shit, sip it again and again until it’s all gone. Yeah, fucking smooth I know, I don’t care if I’m not smooth, I’m fucking driftwood.

You think that’s important right, that thought you have that makes you a person. A three dimensional person. The things that make up your thoughts and feelings that you could only ever articulate the smallest slither of. Maybe you think you’ll do something, or find someone. It doesn’t matter ultimately, because they’re yours alone and not anyone else’s.

I don’t like bullies, people who decide to use their articulated thoughts to get what they want at the expense of other people. Often though I find myself asking why they’re doing that? Because it normally comes from a place of pain. I want you here right now, all the time because I’m lonely and I’m afraid of being alone and I have this bubbling anxiety that you’ll find something better without me. Yet instead of saying that, instead of being honest and attempting to articulate that dimension of you, others find it easier at times to use the surface of it to satisfy that wound.

I had some interesting responses from people that felt that way. One made a comic strip explaining what was wrong with me. How I failed to understand things and why I was a broken piece of shit. It was a little baffling and slightly insulting. The assumption I couldn’t comprehend their view, when in reality I think I just didn’t want to understand it. So desperate measures I suppose. I had another who got a little too emotionally close too soon. While I just pretended it wasn’t happening. We had ceased seeing each other for a while, a number of months passed and I thought we could still be friends. Though as we sat opposite the quays they said they wanted to kiss me, but not before pointing to to their partner’s apartment across the water. I didn’t know what to make of that. I’m not a prude and I’ve messed around in affairs before but I felt very ill in that moment. Because it’s easy to kiss someone, in fact it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. To promise someone validation by offering them affection, time, acknowledgement.

That’s not adult though is it. To be co-dependent. Because it only takes one thing to break the system. I suppose I’m quite independent when I’m independent, and not so independent when I’m feeling not so independent. Those tides in me change often and rapidly and it’s easy to fall into a relationship where the other assumes your one or the other all the time, and that when you change they react like it’s something unusual, new and not a real ”part of you”, just a blip. Maybe it is, but it’s a reoccurring blip. Because you’re a person too, a three dimensional person, where you’re deciding how to articulate the full force of your every thought and feeling. Choosing what to say and how to say it, and sometimes you don’t even really get to choose, you’re just at the whims of the cuts inside your mouth bleeding out into words and whines.

The implication that you depend on me can leave me with an uncomfortable feeling. Not because I don’t care, or I’m angry at you for it, but because I’m scared I’ll fuck it up. What is anger but fear, wounded from a place so deep it reflects more in the person that’s angry then the one you’re angry at? Not that I could ever be angry at you. Cause as much as I hate to admit it I depend on you too. What should I do? What do you want to know? I’ll tell you. I hate it when my friends sit across the table and dissect my life, like they understand where I come from or what I mean. Writing jokes on whiteboards like I act seriously. When I joke, when it’s always a joke.

It is though, because you’ve never loved yourself. The universe man, it’s split in three. In our heads too, the way we separate things. Past, present, future. How do you even know if you’re experiencing the present? How do you even know what you’re doing now isn’t just a memory? Maybe it all is, and you’re just reliving it at the end. Or you’ll wake up after you die and it’s all a dream.

Yeah maybe they’re right and they should up your dose of antipsychotics. That would be easier for them right. Neglect you again. Maybe the piece of shit CBT officer can give you some comfort in that cold empty room you visit once a week. Oh you dread the bus ride you take alone. Waiting forty minutes in the cold just so you can be told you’re crazy, and when you break down in tears there’s no comfort from them, or anyone. You’re crazy right? So fuck you. That’s what they make you feel like. Everyone and everything. It’s just a fucking write off. You hate yourself because you’re overwhelmed by the idea that you’re different. You’re not different though, you just fell into the system that turns people into products. Pushed around by privileged career shits that gave up caring twenty years ago. Just waiting for their pension to mature so they can retire with their double garage. They’re not there to enable you, they’re there to not be accountable for when something goes wrong. ‘’It’s not our fault it’s cause they went off their meds’’. ‘’It’s not our fault they never showed up’’. Showed up for what? Showed up to be burned again, to be reminded that world sees you as an anomaly, a problem. Fuck that. I want to be happy. Is that hard to ask?
Sometimes you feel like a red hot chilli peppers song, sometimes you feel like you don’t have a partner, sometimes you feel like a fucking a loser baby so why don’t you kill me, sometimes you feel like you’re taking ten steps back just to take a few more.

The city is a pretty great place, if you want to do coke on the shelf of a bathroom stall that is, or talk to the homeless tell you a deeply troubling story about the time he was molested when he was twelve. Like… I didn’t really try hard for insane things to happen in my life they just sort of did.

I hate saying this but I get a little anxious at the thought of seeing old faces from a life I don’t recognize anymore. I was at a train station and ran into an old roommate, I didn’t even recognise him, even though just months earlier his pet snake had gotten out and had been living under my bed for several weeks without my knowledge. Yeah that was a pretty scary discovery. I didn’t know what to say to him, I asked after the snake, George and got a smile and some throwaway reply. Despite the fact we boarded the same train we didn’t continue to talk, we even sat two seats apart but we just let that awkward silence settled on the both of us. I guess we had both silently agreed that the end of our relationship in any form was the best for the both of us. I think in that moment, that moment when we knew we would never speak again, by choice or accident, that I understood him more than I ever had before.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, the power of leaving. A website I used to frequent recently closed its doors for good and it felt like a nice closing chapter for me. I don’t like being depended on much, relationships, especially romantic ones make me uncomfortable. I’m not sure if I can sustain anyone I have, it’s something that sits and rattles in my head like ”is this actually healthy for me?”. I think I might have another one of those moments soon, those mutual glances when we acknowledge this is the bridge and it’s burning and we’re not fighting to save it. Maybe in that moment, stripped down of all artifice, all assumptions and ideas of grandeur or perceived good, when you really see a person tear out your heart, then and only then will you really know them, every inch. You’ll wonder too in that moment if you convinced yourself that they were never this person before, but in truth you know, you both were just going through the motions. The fancy dress facade you use when you want someone to love you. When you want someone to be something and make you something to.

I had a bad moment in my life when I treated a series of people really badly, I was working through some fucked up shit and this resulted in a really aggressive series of bad entanglements. In a way though I was kind of okay with being the bastard at the time, because being the bastard is easy right? It makes you unaccountable. If you’re the asshole, you don’t have to live up to any standards cause obviously you’re the asshole and you’ve always been the asshole. I’ve had people tell me I’m the best person they know, or stupid shit like, I’m the most important thing in their life… In truth I cringe a little when I hear those things, I feel so disconnected from those words. From those feelings. Maybe I do have a dissociative disorder or something. Sometimes I see things and I think things, I get overwhelmed by the idea that I’m different. That I’m just not the same I can’t function like others. I know it’s arrogant to assume these feelings of, well… Not belonging are unique to me, I know they’re not. It’s just hard to have that perspective in the moment though.

I guess it comes down to fear right? That’s what it has to be? I have this special nervousness attached to questions pertaining to how I am or what I’ve done. I’m turning 22 soon. Just a couple of days now. Maybe I’ll feel something then, but right now I just can’t sleep. I’m staring at the ceiling thinking of people I haven’t seen in years, reliving moments so strongly my chest tightens. I can’t help but wonder in the darkness then, if they too, wherever they are share those same memories, those same thoughts. I don’t know if it’s comforting, or even…. Uncomforting to know either way. Maybe I’m the crazy one who just can’t grow up, leave my mistakes behind.

I have no answers if I’m doing the right thing, if I’m being the best person I can or if I’m just floundering in the darkness, trying to grasp onto something that explains my unraveled mess of a psyche. I don’t really know how to end this, I don’t really how to move on, change my mind set and come back to being… Happy…

Maybe this year, the oldest and the youngest I’ll ever, ever be will be the turning point. The moment when it makes sense. I think I need that hope to hold onto right now.

If you’re out there, thinking, feeling something for someone, maybe you too have your own little person thinking back about you, writing some dribble on a blog post because they can’t sleep.

Time is wasting, youth is fleeting, you’re dying. No really. You. Are. Dying. Every second you waste reading this sentence is another you will never get back. You may laugh now, scoff, make humorous gestures, but the truth is you know, and you fear it just as much as me. You’re going to die very soon, your youth, which once seemed an endless consistency in a world that spilt out of a firmly smiling mouth has begun to crumble and will soon be gone forever. Spent, wasted, dead.

What the fuck should we do then? Fuck if I know, seriously. I expect people to feel the same way I do, hold the same beliefs I do, yet I do nothing to advocate or support either of them. I arrogantly assume that simply believing in them is enough. That old adage, we all know, if you don’t film it, it didn’t happen, has a sort of profound relevance here. If you didn’t preach it, you didn’t feel it. So yeah, no matter how many hammer and sickle pins I stick on my designer jacket I’ll never crush the mighty bourgeois.

The last year’s been pretty drastic for me and I think it’s made me a far more confident but ultimately fragile person. Despite a few successful and unsuccessful forays into the dating scene I still found intimacy a deeply difficult challenge. I think I took The Cars song, Just What I Needed, a little too literally. Because I really do sometimes feel like I need someone to love to validate myself. I think that one made me very awkward in a lot of cases, that and the confused mix of booze and oxycontin led to many bumbling nights of exploring shaking hands and LED lights flickering like we were running the sesh life.

One particularly attractive Austrian girl appeared in my Kitchen one evening and after consuming an entire bottle of fireball to myself, yes every last drop. I began mocking her home then proceeded to black out. I woke up and she was in my bed with me, although we didn’t have sex she just stayed over. Apparently, though I had been performing the Nazi salute while telling her to shut up and help her Führer undress. Which she did but only because I had vomited on myself. Yeah, it was a good evening…

I think I quite immaturely I let my insecurities dictate my understanding most of the time and instead of maybe being a bit more confident and seeing it through I chicken out. I mean… It feels like I chickened out…

I think it’s been quite dangerous for me because I’ve been in physically abusive relationships just to feel it. In those moments you don’t want to not believe the person doesn’t love you.

I don’t know I don’t really know what to do with this blog anymore. It was a tool that filtered my life at a very different time. It was something for me to focus on when I had nothing and no one else too. I’ve spent a long time trying to find the right thing to post, I’m not sure this is it, but either way I’m writing it so I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s right or not. I guess my point is that the words I write on this blog don’t help me anymore. They are someone else’s now. Maybe they’ll help or do something for the person that might happen, by some awful mistake stumble upon them. All I can ask from this place is that it keeps its promise, and my life is never like it was before. I don’t need you anymore, and I never want to again.

Is not exactly a name you can drop in a casual conversation about bands. You can’t nod and agree with that stranger you’re stranded with at this party that ‘yeah that Blink 182’s new album wasn’t ‘’that’’ bad’… Then talk about the kind of music that would typically characterise that of a depressed angst riddled teen. At least not without garnering a few strange glances, but hey that was going to happen anyway. Though in many ways Mat Cothran and Delaney Mills’ sound has always sort of embodied that awkward sideways look. Despite the impenetrable appearance albums by lo-fi, hipsters that use random apostrophes have, the music in Dreamin’ is pretty casual easy listening. It’s an appropriate sequel to that stage in your life where you were just cutting your teeth on cynicism and introspection. Maybe you grew your hair out or became a communist or even tore down your Sonic the Hedgehog posters to show two fingers to the man. Despite however old I get, actually maybe because of it I feel a growing insatiable need to not forget that stage in my life. California Dreamin’ is at its core a good excuse to remember.

The album is a bit of an anomaly in their repertoire. Most of it salvaged material from previously unreleased songs recorded inside seedy hotel room’s way back in 2013. The sound’s considerable stripped down compared to their recent releases and the production values are terribly low. It takes away a bit of the punch Cothran’s delivery typically has though that’s par for the course in this indie lo-fi genre. The distortion and thin vocals give the album that comfortably twee campus radio twang that you might hear drifting from a dorm window or screeching from some junk car owned by a hippy slacker. The vocals, are dreamy and a little poppy and though the lyrics are Elvis Depressedly ‘sad’ ™ it retains that raw intimacy that makes their sound so compelling.

The sound of Elvis Depressedly much like my angst is not unique as it once was. Teen Suicide, who have just been resurrected by Depressedly’s own record label Running for Cover had a much stronger release with ‘It’s the Big Joyous Celebration’ just two months before. Teen Suicide also wins in the edgy band name category. Though maybe Depressedly can claw back some cred with a few more random apostrophes and even an umlaut thrown in for good measure.

Still a special place remains in my heart for Elvis Depressedly. When I first heard the album it was like I had heard it before, like I knew it. Not literally of course but it reawakened that teen edge in me. That nostalgic list of songs I’d listen to on repeat and soaked in. It’s an album that couldn’t be further from a solitary experience. It’s so mired in the past work of its creators and their influences. To consider California Dreamin’ as that alone would be a discredit to what the band has transformed into. Their last album boldly claimed that ‘the sad songs were over’, which in a shameful way was disheartening. Because I had the misconception that sad is kind of all Elvis Depressedly ever is. I think California Dreamin’ proves me wrong. The album is the fleeting feeling of hesitant hope that can follow in the wake of devastating depression. Elvis Depressedly was never ‘just sad’, they were always just themselves.

My Mother had three boys between two different men, all of whom have nothing to do with her or their offspring. Elaborate tales of why spun across dining tables, as if the why’s matter and they bring comfort. Because really there’s no reason why things happen, they just do, but it’s a reality we hide from children. Like they should be privileged to live in this frame where rhymes make a rhythm. All this fancying, this bone breaking theater leaves us with, is not some optimistic vision of the world, our future, our place in the universe spiritually or materialistically, but an aching hole and hunger, a wound dying to go back to that time, that lie that seemed so real.

I’ve been alone most of my life, unable to connect to the many colors of my family. The first a neurotic mess crippled by a perceived wrong, addled with aggression and a an abrasive sense of justness. The second an unperturbed liar, a narcissistic capable of hurting so easily; and the worst, the last one thrown out, a flavorless fuck incapable and lame. Vile and hurtful. Not even aware enough to describe themselves as anything more than a pitiful excuse for a person.

I grew up confused and I sometimes day-dream about my death. Who would mourn for me, pour water on my grave, breath heat into the soil? It’s a small list and gets smaller still. I try to imagine when my bones will be bleached and if anyone will write for me. Will anyone love me then.

That day, the heat was terrible, but I perched under that tree, scared of what I might find. A terrible fear that I didn’t know what to do with. I was bad to that dog. I hardly ever took her out, forgot about her, didn’t stroke her enough share with her… Now she was sentenced to death, and all I was faced with was the miserable things I had failed at. Not a good memory in sight, and I wonder if she knew that…

I didn’t want to look at death, at suicide, because I imagined that I, through action or inaction had helped those seeds grow and those wounds fester…

Or maybe it was the powerless feeling that unsettled me so much, a lack of confidence to change the world. A time where those lies I had as a child would be so handy. Where I could spin yarns like my mother and brothers did, lies about how things are, and why they happen. Feed that wound, not only in someone, but in myself. Was it easy to do? I don’t even remember it, maybe no one does, maybe it’s natural, inert in us to sooth like that, with fiction, but it never does sooth, it only furthers that extension.

The strain she has. I can’t reach around it, not with words, only with my arms. I want to feel the re-verb of her chest open and close. I want her to feel me dying with her… I just… Want her not to hurt anymore.

An overdose of anesthetic, it seemed so easy. A cardiac arrest and complete failure of the respiratory system seizes the body. . Her paw, listlessly hangs off the table. it’s movement, not governed by the force of her body, her might and muscle, but by the force of gravity. The line break between life and death. The snap of the fingers, that warns you she’s dead; and it awakens a primal, cave like fear. A want to leave it, images of carcass I’ve seen on the shore. rotten and eaten sheep. Bloated ribcages exploded and open. the gases once inside having grown and burst, popping the body like a balloon.

I picture my hands, as I lifted myself off her plunging into her rotted rib-cage, getting stuck on the bones and congealing blood…

yet the worst part, was that I left her there, on that gaudy stainless steel frame with a rubberized black top that’s convenient to clean. It’s such a fucking indignity, it offends me to see that, her paw so, dead. Her eyes sit open but they are still, she’s dead. I tried, before I left, to…

Put her paw back, to leave her in a more, peaceful position, as if it matter, but every time, it flopped back, and with each attempt, I grew just a more numb until it didn’t even matter any more.

She was dead. When A second ago she was driven by this urge to exist. The cells inside her dividing and copying themselves, growing and living and mutating. The urge to live, the divinity of self-interest. Matters to us all, matters to me, but when this dog, this unloved dog died on that table, me clutching her shaking form was I respecting that?

Yet I still ask the woman I love, who wants to die, to live. I lie and say I showed that dog a mercy, when It wanted to live and to live with, a cruel joke.

I held that body.

That dog of matted hair, stinking the way she always stank, hair coming away with me, playing in my fingers on the drive home. The wound in my stomach growing till the point of vomit.

When I held that dog on that table, that awful terrible table, I imagined you in your coffin. Me, being unable to love you. A stranger to your family, a stranger to your husband, a gritted eulogy, where I would introduce myself as a colleague, unable to say the things I could never say again. The threads of me that bleed into you severed, broken nerves that would never heal or leave. A brain too dumb to recognize their deadness, always sending signals to those frayed corners going nowhere. To big, to colorful and hungry to let anything else grow. And to you, that you would leave without me, perhaps I am not intended to see. To know of… Yet my whole being just wants it, to hold you all the time, and when I picture your body that urge is so painful, so sharp.

I held a dead body that day, I didn’t want to hold yours, not because I wouldn’t, because I would, I’d’ never let go, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world without you.

I wish I had, some profound point to leave, some moment of clarity when it clicks and makes sense, but that would be another lie for another child. Because there isn’t one.

It’s you and me, our lives, our memories, our moments. Each second passing irretrievable. I say that I love you, because I know that each second that does pass with you, I don’t want to retrieve, I want to preserve.

Life sucks. Yeah, take that universe I’m defying you. Fuck you and your imagined omnipotence.

I don’t like writing about what I do because I’m afraid I’ll turn this blog or even just this post into some sort of new media CV, where people invest ideas in me that are so detached from reality they might imagine me as some artistic Tibetan farmer who trains warrior owls with a masters in social sciences.

Also there’s that fear that if you advertise your skills you open yourself up to the judgement of the masses, where standards have no meaning, and you’ll never be quite as ”good” as the next guy. All that said I have some skills, they serve the video industry. I’m a fast and fairly talented editor, I’m a writer and can’t stop pointing my camera at things. Do I make sketches as 99.99% of the internet does? Not often, although I have dabbled. I mostly make music video… Things…

I enjoy it a hell of a lot. I like to soak into a song imagine the image, create the image, and boom, cut it. This order swaps and gets switched around sometimes. It’s not always song to image but image to song. Why do I do this? I don’t know, maybe it’s to create my own slice of self-preservation. I don’t particularly want kids, so maybe this is something I could be remembered for. Although that sentiment doesn’t normally reach me when I’m in the middle of it. I’m to busy just being there, being creative. Doing something and making something that I can own. That no one else, not another soul of the 7 billion odd people on earth can stake a claim to.

It’s mine…

So where do I find myself with this rather unpractical, everyday bread on the table skill set? At a crossroads. University is in-front of me. I got into a place situated inside Manchester’s media city. It’s pretty prestigious and I was recognized on the merit of my work alone, which to be honest felt amazing.

Although It’s the biggest commitment I’ve ever made. Three years. Three years toiling at something huge. is it what I want? As I maybe stagnate in a classroom will the world move on? God I hope not. There’s a woman I love and it is hard to imagine not being able to see her. I’ll have to move. It will be lonely and everyday I will miss her more than the last.

Without her I feel incomplete. The touch, the body filled with hot blood, waving curves of sinew, and skin. I can feel all that blood. Is it even your blood? How can you be sure? We share it. Then there’s the dizzy rotating feeling of hands. Hands on mine, hands across surfaces. Hands holding the little unspoken promises that mean more than any material ever could. Words in frozen time that only breaks when the touch is gone, but we long remember the stench burned into our nostrils, our bodies…

Now I wonder, where your hands are?

When will they next touch me and unravel that mystery inside. The one that haunts me every moment I’m out of your view.

I want to believe that this course will fling me into a well-paying career doing what I simply love and from there I’ll save and buy a small holding. Escape the bile of society and the obsession with the material. Become one with the land and feel connected to something more than me, responsible. After that… All I want to do is invite her there, all I can offer her is myself. Yet I’m afraid. Afraid that at one point in that plan, at one step I’ll lose track. I’ll find myself working on something I loath, or find myself outclassed by others with more refined skills. More importantly I’m afraid that in three years, maybe longer, the woman I love will be somewhere else. That I’ll appear boring or distant.

Though I’m comforted when she expresses the same fears as me, the banal worry that we might become… ”Boring”. Because that’s when I know, that she never could be to me. I can’t worry about forever.

I know we all feel cracks, we all slowly crumbling away from our perfect forms, but there’s so much time between those moments; and when we finally do fall apart, that’s when we can really see each other. Because we look out of our cracks, through ourselves and past theirs, right to the core. It wasn’t until she saw me crack that I knew, that I wouldn’t have to worry about forever. Before that we were just enjoying the idea of each other, watching the surf at the surface, but once we cracked, the light got in, and we could see it all, each other from the inside out.